


Divinity

by stickylips14



Series: The Watcher: Side Stories [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Demon hunter!Shiro, Demons, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, Ghosts, Guilt, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, SHEITH - Freeform, Supernatural Elements, Unreliable Narrator, alternate universe - hellrift, demon hunter!Keith, demon hunting bfs, spooky stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 19:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14385666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickylips14/pseuds/stickylips14
Summary: After throwing Bezaliel back down to Hell, payback is on double-time, keeping Keith and Shiro busy and pretty well paid. Demon-hunting is vocational training though, and even the best (possibly only) team in Garrison get caught off guard from time to time.





	Divinity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CrazyIndigoChild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrazyIndigoChild/gifts).



> For Indi, who has been endlessly supportive of me through some pretty rough times. Thank you for being exactly who you are, for not buying into my self-defeatist bullshit, and for sending all sorts of bizarre shit via discord. Whatever life's like without you, I ain't interested in knowing x

It tends to be a bad sign when I wake up before Shiro. The sun’s out but it’s early enough that the room still feels grey when I roll over onto my back and sigh my defeat; I’m awake. No going back. Beside me Shiro presses his face a little further into his pillow and doesn’t stir when I run my fingers through the streak of white in his hair. Shiro still dreams about it. He doesn’t have to tell me for me to know it, just like I don’t need to tell him about my dreams for him to know when they’re weighing on me. From the moment we met we understood each other.

I let him rest, climbing out of bed carefully and pulling on one of his shirts as I head out into our kitchen to make a pot of coffee. I watch the sunlight creep slowly up the walls and finish my first cup before the peace is disturbed. My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter where I leave it to charge at night because, fuck, we deserve some peace.

It’s Allura of course, so I answer with a grunt of acknowledgment as I get up to refill my mug.

“Oh, I was expecting your voicemail.”

“Well, ain’t it your lucky day then.” I say, putting on airs about how grumpy and tired I actually am. Maybe she’ll go easy on me if she thinks I’m backing down on my sleeping schedule again. But it’s pretty hard to trick your sister, more so when she’s a psychic. “Shoot.”

“I have a job for you.” Naturally. Ever since we tossed Bezaliel back down to hell, the rift has been relentlessly aggressive. The overspill meant that my bills were getting paid, that was for sure. I hum to let her know I’m listening. “Down at the river docks. There’s an infestation of imps that’s causing havoc on the new construction down there.”

“The river docks in downtown.” I clarify through my teeth. West downtown. Downtown where I lost my good knife and a chunk of my shoulder and a lot of blood _downtown_.

“Keith...” Allura tries, but we both know that I’m going to take the job anyway. Imps are tricky only when they have decent numbers and I have a partner now which makes big jobs manageable jobs. And, more importantly for my guilt-driven ass, I’m the reason for the overspill so it’s my responsibility to keep it under control. I sigh and start searching for my pack of smokes. “It’s not urgent. There’s no-one on site over the weekend, so you can go when you’re ready. I have to go open the shop, so I’ll talk to you later, alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’ll let you know how we get on.” I drop the call and shove a cigarette between my lips, about to light up inside when Shiro comes out of our room, yawning and scratching and then stopping dead to frown at me. I shove my lighter in the breast pocket of his shirt that I’m wearing and smile crookedly.

“You weren’t about to break basically the only house rule we have, were you?” He asks as he slips into the kitchen to make his coffee, choking it with milk and sugar. I tail after him, tucking my cigarette away as well so I can kiss at his shoulders until he forgives me.

“I would never. Did I wake you?”

“No,” my plan worked, Shiro’s shoulders starting to lose their tension under my gentle, suck-up affection. “So what’s the job then, babe?”

“Imps.” Shiro groans and turns around in my arms, mindful not to whack me with his hot mug of coffee as he arranges his arms to pull me close, smoothing the fabric of his shirt down the curve of my back. He groans even more dramatically when I fill him in on the rest, rolling his head back to stare at the ceiling. Then he takes a sip of his coffee and kisses my crown.

“Well, I suppose we better start getting ready. Wanna shower?”

Showering together proves to be more of a distraction than a timesaver, but given that I’m about to be dragged screaming and kicking to a part of Garrison I hate above the rest, I deserve a little fooling around. Once we’re dried and dressed Shiro and I fall into the easy routine of picking out appropriate weapons, double checking them for flaws, packing anything else that might come in handy. Road flares have proven to be one of my favorites, excellent at catching the attention of the supernatural who are either repelled by it or drawn to the light like flies to shit. We load up into my truck and it starts on the first try- this thing that it does once Shiro got a buddy of his to look at it. If we had taken it to an actual shop, it probably would have been written off.

 

The docks are dilapidated, rotting buildings that haven’t been used since Garrison cottoned on to transporting goods via plane and truck about thirty years ago. The docks themselves had been eaten up by the river back when I was still a kid and now, as I pull up to them, the remaining buildings are surrounded by chain link fences, big padlocks and hazard boards used to keep would-be squatters out. And I guess supernatural garbagemen, but generally speaking it took more than a chain link fence to stop me from getting my job done.

It’s a mild Spring day but down here by the river, it feels darker and later than just past noon and I don’t know if it’s because this place is brimming with spirits both new and old or just because this place fucking sucks. I zip my hoodie up and give the lock on the gate a cursory glance; not worth the hassle. Shiro gives me a boost and I scrabble up the chain link fence with my usual grace and try not to stare too hard when Shiro practically vaults over it. Show off. Super hot show off. Head in the game. I pop the catch on my knife sheath as we make our cautious way towards the nearest building, the old wooden door uneven on its hinges and gives a dramatic wail as I nudge it open with my foot. The air is briny and stale and Shiro is warm against my back as we wander into the cavernous room. We’ve gotten good at communicating without speaking, keeping noise to a minimum before we’ve properly scoped things out. I grab the road flare from my back pocket and Shiro gives me a wide berth while I rip the cap off and once it’s lit, I wing it out into the dark in an arc of fizzing red light. It bounces and rolls along the warped wooden floor and not a second after it’s stopped moving do the walls start.

Knives in hand, Shiro and I watch as the shadows shudder and wake up, the strange clicking chirrups of the imps bouncing off the walls. A large nest isn’t uncommon, I had come ready for a bit of a fight, but this… This might be a touch more than I can handle. The black mass of imps filled in with a little more detail as they started to crowd around the red light of the flare, their strange, sharp faces not the most horrifying thing I’ve seen by far. Imps are pests. Tricksters. They like to make your things go missing, rattle the ladder you’re standing on, occasionally they’ll push you clean off it. But they weren’t man-killers intentionally and so there was a chance that if Shiro and I put enough down, the rest would scram to some place less inhabited and a job that could be difficult would turn easy.

Well. There was nothing for it except to run in head-first and hope for the best. So that’s what Shiro and I do, after a heartfelt eye-contact conversation, because we’re good at that now too.

Ten minutes in and we were both a little out of breath and we’d only made a small dent in the swarm of imps, now aware of our presence and recognizing us as a threat to their colony. A handful of sharp claws scratched up my leg and I kicked out at the creature, bowling it into a few of its mates but this was no way to get the job done.

“Babe, we need a new strategy!” Shiro called over his shoulder just as the same thought occured to me. Nodding, mostly to myself, I fought my way through until I could stand back to back with Shiro. “Got any thoughts?”

“I--” I froze in my tracks and Shiro did too, lowering our weapons as the imps… Started to back down. Chittering to one another the little bastards started to stumble backwards, back towards the shadows and then they were dashing up and out of the building, slipping out through the broken windows and the gaps in the side cladding. “... That works. Guess they finally realized who we were!”

“... Keith.” Shiro called in the tone of his that makes my heart sink down into my gut. The imps were well and truly scattered now and among the stench of brine and rot came something else, something I’m reluctantly familiar with. The smell that had clung to Shiro’s corpse as I held it in my arms for centuries, the stench of the open rift. Tar, acidic and choking and coupled with a smack of PTSD. I grab Shiro’s hand tight in mine, pulling him hard against my back as I try to watch every dark corner of the building at once, trying to find the source.

It’s raising up from the floorboards. I notice because there’s a warmth coming through the sole of my boots and the stench is growing stronger and stronger as tar bubbles up between the floorboards. I gag, shoving Shiro forward as I try to unstick myself from the floor because no- no _fucking_ way are _either_ of us going back down there in the cold and the dark where time never passes but things still rot and decay. The old wooden floorboards groan, start buckling and splintering as something pulls up from underneath and all I can see is silver hair and scorched robes smearing black mire over my lover’s grey face. Shiro squeezes my hand so hard it aches.

“Keith. Stay with me.”  

Wisps of black raise up from the tar, curling like smoke as it slowly starts to converge in the air in front and above Shiro and I. My heart claws its way up from my guts to my throat as I gape, helpless, useless, my grip limp around my knife.

“Keith!”

A warm, rough hand (wasn’t always rough- used to be soft - he’s had to fight so much since he’s met me don’t drown in the guilt ) closes over my eyes and my world goes black. Shiro’s arm wraps around my waist and my feet come away from the floor. He scoops me up like a damsel when he’s gone through so much worse than me, but he doesn’t hold it against me, instead holding me against his chest as he stumbles away from the smoke and the tar, putting me down a few feet from the door. He tells me not to look back and I obey, feeling the surge of malicious energy right on our heels as I scramble up the chain link fence and hit the ground with a grunt. I learned in Arus that the best thing to do when working a job is to leave my keys in the ignition for these exact moments where my blood is roaring in my ears and I don’t have time to fumble around. As soon as Shiro’s in the truck I start the engine and make a sharp turn onto the road.

Fucking downtown Garrison.

I put a few blocks between us and the docks and stop breaking the speed limit. I scrub the heel of my hand against my eye; I’ve gotten a fleck of something lodged in there, irritating my eye and making my vision spot with black. I curse under my breath, jamming my knee against the steering wheel so I can scrub at my face as my eyes start to water and the black specks start to spread out. I look over at Shiro, opening my mouth to complain and- he’s talking, face painted with concern, but I can’t hear a thing he’s saying. And my words aren’t making it out past the tip of my tongue, curling back so I choke on them instead. My panic becomes suffocating as my vision starts to fail completely, Shiro’s face blurring and distorting behind the swirls and wisps of black smoke.

The stench of tar hits me like the punch to the gut, making me gasp and choke and curl in on myself like I could climb into myself to escape it. The last thing I remember before the world went black was a face, loose like a reflection in water, sharply shaped eyes and a pleased, cruel mouth and the grating sound of metal being crushed.

 

I’m used to the feeling of blood on my face, sticky hot, caught in my lashes and my eyebrows. The other source of warmth takes me a moment longer to recognize as fingers, a hand cupping my cheek, stroking reverently at the skin and blood.

“Keith? Keith, please, baby, I need you to look at me.” Shiro’s voice is strained, scratchy and distant while he holds my head in his hands. The more I reinhabit my body the more sore I become, my neck and shoulders aching, the rest of me feeling cored out and held together only by skin. Opening my eyes is an Olympic-worthy struggle but I do my best, blinking away brusts of colors to find Shiro leaning over me, relief filling his features. There’s a big bruise forming along the side of his face but I can’t seem to make my hand move up to check on it. “Oh, God, baby, you scared me.”

“M’Sorry…” I slur, blinking hard and carefully craning my neck; I’m lying on the sidewalk and as I look up the road I can see a twisted mess of faded red metal and wheels. I can’t believe that I feel like crying over my truck being completely fucking totalled but here I am, staring longingly at my old companion flipped upside down and crumbled in on herself. “What the fuck…?”

Shiro soothes me gently, his hand trembling like he knows something I don’t. He rests me down in his lap as he digs for his phone in his pocket, jabbing at the screen and there’s that wash of relief again as it responds. He’s calling for an ambulance and I make some vague gesture trying to wave him off. Instead he takes my hand in his, kissing my palm. Huh. There are some angles that shouldn’t be there in my fingers, blood streaking down the back of my hand and up my arm. I’m feeling tired, sluggish, fading in and out of Shiro’s conversation with the emergency services and the creeping sense of dread. Everything smells of tar so it’s hard to recognize the exact moment the stench gets stronger but it does, and Shiro lowers his phone, slowly looking up one end of the road and then the other.

We both see it in the distance, that strange smoky apparition with it’s sharp, cruel features attached to an unsteady form; no discernable head or body, just a swarming mass raising up and eying me like a bird of prey. The problem is, my head is spinning too much for me to have the focus required to be afraid. My fight or flight response ignores me as I repeatedly slam my fist down on the button. I’m aching and broken.

“Stay back!” Shiro barks. I’m dead weight. If I could get my feet under me we could make a run for it, severely unequipped to deal with malicious spirits right now, but as it stands I’m a liability, keeping Shiro tethered and exposed on the sidewalk. I guess demons and shit have switched up their gambit because there’s no deep, menacing laughter as it rears up and then makes its kill dash, it’s mouth opening up into a void as its smoky body fills up my vision again. Shiro’s hand curls into my shoulder and pulls me closer to him and whatever strength I have left I do my best to lend to him but I’m fading fast. I taste blood on my tongue and it’s hard to see through my eyelashes again, my blood caking them.

“I said _stay away from him_!” Shiro shouts, flinging his hand out as a last defense and of all the fucking ways I thought I would die, bleeding heavily from a head wound in my lover’s arms on a downtown Garrison sidewalk, well… I suppose it could be worse. I tip my head to rest against his arm, looking up at his face at an odd angle but I can see the tension in his jaw as he grinds his teeth, the creases around his eyes from his scowl. He shouts again and… I feel a warmth radiate off of him, where his fingers press into my shoulder it feels like I’m getting a static shock, and from his outstretched hand, shaky and small in comparison to the entity he’s facing down, light explodes. Like a flash grenade of holy light that half blinds me. A clap like thunder follows it, and underneath that I can hear the shriek of the spirit being flayed down to nothing.

I see Shiro, shaky and sweating, staring at his hand in astonishment, his gaze sliding over to meet mine. And then the world goes black again.

 

Waking up exhausted isn’t new to me, but I still feel the need to make a production out of it, groaning and huffing as I yawn and blink up at the bright, sterile lights of a hospital room. The first thing I notice besides that I am indeed in a hospital, is that my little heart monitor doodad is on my ring finger, the others wrapped up tight and out of commission. My wrist is braced but thankfully not broken and when I breath I can feel the ache that comes from whiplashing against a seatbelt. My forehead itches something vicious. Stitches. Damn. Ain’t I a pretty picture these days, with my ever-accumulating scars?

To my side is Shiro, curled up in a chair dozing with a paper cup of shitty nurse station coffee placed carefully on the floor next to him. He’s usually awake for these moments, though I wish we didn’t have so many that I knew the routine- but as far as grievous bodily harm went, this is a very mild case for me. Shiro wasn’t greying from worry, but maybe I was a little. What happened, for the most part, is a hazy blur of panic. What I do remember is Shiro holding his hand out like it would shield us, and then it doing just that. That bright wash of light that I could only describe as _holy_ , ripping through the wispy body of the entity that had tried to make a snack out of me.

What the _fuck_ had all that been about?

Shiro stirs like he knows I’m staring at him, rubbing a hand over his eyes and I decide not to say anything about the imprint of the chair’s upholstery on his cheek. His other cheek is swollen slightly, bruised red and purple. We had both been in that car crash. On seeing me awake he smiles, getting up to perch on the edge of my bed instead, his hand resting on my hip through the hospital bedding.

“Welcome back to the world,” He says with a smile softer than his tone, giving my hip a gentle squeeze. I smile back, and then my expression drops shortly there after.

“Oh fuck. I totalled my truck, didn’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.” Shiro is sympathetic and I’m genuinely heartbroken, slumping down into my pillow; I’ve had that truck since I first got my driver’s license. Sure, she was a hunk of junk and barely road-worthy, but I had dragged my ass back to Arus to get her. We had history. She was like an annoying sister. Also, I left almost an entire pack of smokes in the centre console. I give myself some time to plow through the stages of grief, and then I sit myself up as carefully as I can, hissing quietly at the neat way my body finds new and exciting places to get bruised and swollen and sore. “Hey, take it easy- I don’t think they’re going to keep you here, but stay in bed until you get the all clear at least.”

“It’s fine, I’m not getting up,” I assure Shiro; I just want to be a little closer to him, leaning forward to rub my cheek into his shoulder. He sighs softly along my crown before kissing my hair. There’s the residue smell of tar on both of us that makes me press my tongue into the roof of my mouth to try and block it out. Shiro runs his hands down along my back. “Shiro… What happened back there? With your hand…?”

“I honestly don’t know.” Shiro murmurs, twirling my hair around his fingertips so that it tickles along the base of my scalp. This was the elephant in the room, the question Shiro had probably been asking himself nonstop once I was deemed stable by the paramedics. “I just… wanted to protect you. If I didn’t do _something_ , it would have killed you.”

“Have you tried to do it again?” I ask after a pause to process the fact that the possibility of my death had been the catalyst for _something_ to awaken in Shiro. From early on in the piece I had suspected he might have been a psychic of some type, an empath. But I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of an empath capable of throwing out pure energy like that. I want to talk to Allura about it as soon as possible, but I don’t get to make that decision. If Shiro wants to bring it up with her then he will, but until then my lips are sealed. Shiro sniffs, burying his nose into my hair and I feel him speak more than I hear it.

“No… After-- whatever that was, I was exhausted. It was all I could do to stay awake long enough to make sure an ambulance found us. I’m still exhausted, honestly.”

I get the feeling that this isn’t something Shiro wants to confront right now, and I can’t blame him. Over the most recent years of his life Shiro has found out a lot of deep secrets about himself; his own deaths, plural, his resurrection- a second one with even less explanation than the first- gaining the sight and having to acknowledge that all the things that go bump in the night are _real--_ and now this, whatever _this_ is.

It’s an old brand of guilt that slides up through my ribs. The guilt that had strangled me when Shiro first looked me in the eyes and lamented taking the life of a ghoul. I had pushed him into that, too, and although I would never part from him now, the dull ember of knowing his life would be much less complicated without me gets a little air breathed on to it. But rather than withdraw I wrap myself tight around him, tucking my head under his chin. We hold each other for a long time, tangled on the hospital bed in the old ritual of recognition, crumbling, piecing back together that comes after a rough job.

We’re interrupted by my doctor who politely clears her throat as she enters the room. Once Shiro and I have made enough room for her, she does my final examinations and I get the all-clear. No overnight stay for me! Shiro gets the list of do’s and don’t’s that I’m expected to follow-- this woman doesn’t even know me and she still knows that reading me the rules would be a waste of breath. I guess if she got even a glimpse at my body she knows that ‘reckless’ is a weak way of describing my lifestyle.

Mine and Shiro’s clothes are a little fucked, reeking of blood and tar and ripped up in a way that can’t be played off as fashionable, but luckily we’re in a hospital so no one really looks at their prime. I limp my way out into the parking lot while Shiro grumbles at my refusing to use a wheelchair, and we order an Uber to get us home now that we’re one truck down. Shiro has a car, a horrifically safe, suburban Prius in _silver_ that we’ll have to make do with until another truck captures my heart.

The moment we get home, we both strip off and climb into bed, nestling together for the best fucking nap of our _lives._ It’s here we indulge in what we couldn’t have at the hospital, the press of skin on skin and slow, easy kisses just to reassure each other that we survived.

We _survived_ and we’re still us at the end of it, no matter how much we got tested. Keith and Shiro, a disastrous, beautiful and always evolving- some times in the most literal ways- team.

Come fuckin’ get us, world. After our nap.

 

**Author's Note:**

> "The Bitch Is Back" - Me, and Keith probably.
> 
> I feel _good_ about this piece, and trust this bloody verse to be the thing that bolsters me back into being a confident writer. I don't mean to write pieces that don't have conclusive ends, and I had previously said that I wouldn't even write anymore for The Watcher-- but I'm a weak binch, so here we are. Will there be more? If someone asks it of me, yeah probably lmao.  
>  I hope you guys enjoy this, although it's brief it was a lot of fun to write!  
> Comment, kudos, let me know what you think!  
> As always, I love you guys. x
> 
> hmu on [tumblr](https://www.stickywrites.tumblr.com), or you can even [tip me](https://ko-fi.com/stickywrites) if you like!


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